


Ice Inside My Soul

by paperdream



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Crossover, Gen, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, very vaguely implied
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-22
Updated: 2015-09-22
Packaged: 2018-04-22 21:42:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4851500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperdream/pseuds/paperdream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>5 times Natasha almost met Jack Frost, and one time she did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ice Inside My Soul

**Author's Note:**

> This took much longer than expected, and I'm not entirely happy with a couple of sections, but I need it done.  
> OCs names may look wrong to people who know anything about Russian names, if they do let me know and I'll do my best to fix it.  
> The title is a modified lyric from "Jar of Hearts".

1.  
The shadows eat at the corners of the dormitory. They’re in invisible to her with her head buried underneath the covers, but she’s certain she can feel them nipping at her fingers, trapped above her head, with tongues tipped in acid. She bites down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from crying until the tiny teeth fade away into numbness above the hard metal around her wrists.  
Slowly, she peeps out from underneath the covers, green eyes seeking out the narrow beam of light sneaking through the single window. When her eyes alight upon the pane, she gasps. A delicate web of frost paints itself across the window, glittering in the shape of a sunburst.  
*  
2.  
They’re shivering in lightweight jackets and shorts, nearly knee deep in snow. Instructor Avilov stands a few feet away with a watch, ticking inexorably on. When she’s sure no one’s watching, Natalia glares at the device counting down to when they’ll be asked to take their jackets off and add them to the pile of clothing at Instructor Avilov’s feet.  
The other girls are restless. They keep shaking grayish snow off their bare feet, trying to look like they aren’t fidgeting. Sonia is trying to hide from the cold under the strands of her long hair that are trying to break loose from their braid again.  
Instructor Avilov nods, and the girls obediently strip off their jackets, leaving them with only tank tops, and stack the jackets on the ground. Natalia reminds herself that she will need to be able to endure the cold in order to properly serve her country when she gets older. “March to the big tree past the gates and back,” the Instructor orders.  
They straggle into a line and march out, trying to step in each other’s footprints. Natalia looks down to see where the next print is and notices something red on her toes. She looks up again quickly. A fresh layer of snow starts to fall.  
The group loops around the tree and is headed back when a snowball flies from somewhere behind Natalia and hits Gala in the back of the head. Everyone freezes, and they’re all looking around for the culprit when Gala starts to laugh and leans down to gather some snow of her own. It hits Sonia in the shoulder, and before she realizes it, Natalia is gathering snow for a snowball of her own.  
The snowball fight that follows is brief, ending when Instructor Avilov storms out of the gates and grabs Mika roughly by the arm, but entirely worth the punishment that follows later that night.  
*  
3.  
At lunch, everyone is whispering to each other. When Natalia sits down with her tray, Gala leans over, eyes bright, “There’s a new Instructor! I heard he spent three months undercover in America, can you believe it?”  
Across the table, Mika nods her head enthusiastically, “I heard he’s one of the best operatives in Europe!”  
Sonia plops down on Natalia’s other side, brushing loose hair away from her face, “I heard he’s handsome!” The girls spend the rest of the meal avoiding eye contact and breaking out in giggles whenever they’re unsuccessful.  
When they arrive in their Beginning Latin class, there’s a man Natalia thinks she recognizes from inspections. He’s well dressed, with a small collection of medals gleaming on his chest. A hush falls over the group as they take their seats, trying not to stare.  
When the last girl has filed in, the man clears his throat and says, “Natalia Romanova and Sonia Pushkina, come with me.”  
Natalia bits the inside of her cheek to keep herself from glancing at Sonia as she rises and follows the man. She’s vaguely aware of Sonia’s footsteps behind her, but her mind is racing with possible explanations. Have they done something wrong? Are they being punished? Are they being given a mission?  
They end up in one of the smaller training rooms, and the man stops just outside of the open door. “You have been chosen to receive additional training so that you may better serve your country. You are to come here instead of your Latin classes for the next two weeks, and you are to address your teacher solely as Instructor. You should be grateful for the chance.”  
Natalia and Sonia barely have time to chorus, “Yes, sir,” before the man has turned on his heel. They stand there frozen for a moment before Sonia creeps forward, peering into the room. As she tiptoes across the threshold, Natalia follows, straining to see into the room.  
Instructor in a tall man, dressed entirely in black combat gear. Greasy brown hair falls around his face, and icy eyes glitter behind it, glowering at the wall. Something about his body language sets Natalia on edge, and she finds herself unconsciously tensing up like she’s going to run.  
When he sees her and Sonia lurking in the doorway, he jerks his head toward the door leading to the outdoor practice yard and turns sharply, expecting them to follow. Sonia starts as his other side swings into view- his left arm is made of a series of reptilian, interlocking silver plates. Suddenly, Sonia’s joke at lunch doesn’t seem so funny.  
Natalia and Sonia tiptoe after him, creeping out the door into the cold winter air. Instructor is already at the other end of the yard, assembling a large array of knives on a cloth spread on the ground. He pulls one up and slides it across his right thumb, drawing a minute amount of blood, wiping the red streak on his clothing and wiping off the knife.  
Natalia bites down hard on the inside of her cheek, nearly drawing blood. Sonia is tense next to her.  
Instructor rises to his feet and strides toward them. Natalia gasps despite herself, but the sound has barely left her when a patch of ice seems to appear out of nowhere under Instructor’s feet, and he slides to the ground.  
Now Sonia is gasping too, and Natalia is pursing her lips to keep from making a noise, because she’s sure if she does it will be a laugh.  
Instructor starts making a strange, rusty noise. Natalia starts, and is almost ready to run back inside and hide- there must be somewhere she won’t be found- when she realizes it’s a laugh.  
Instructor rises to his knees, shoulders shaking and eyes confused like he’s not sure of what he’s doing any more than they are. He rises to his feet and kicks at the patch of ice, shattering it.  
Cautiously, Sonia giggles, and Natalia can barely help following. Instructor starts kicking snow to the edges of the practice yard, “Can’t have one of you cracking your head open, can we?”  
Natalia starts- Instructor has an American accent. She wonders where he got it, but the looks just as surprised as they are. She moves over to help kick the snow out of the yard, still giggling.  
*  
4.  
Natalia points her toes so hard she would swear she could hear them pop over the boom of the orchestra. Excitement thrills up her spine as the music crescendos and the curtain falls.  
She falls into a curtsey as the curtain rises again and the audience applauds before she follows the other girls offstage and down to the dressing rooms. She maintains her plastered-on stage smile as the privacy of the small room causes chatter to break out among the other girls and pulls her tutu off in a waft of tulle. She carefully pulls her slippers off, places them gently into their box, and wipes off her makeup.  
She pulls thick, blessedly warm pants and a coat over her tights and leotard, then socks that are barely thick enough to do good rolled up in the toes of her too-big boots, let along on her feet. Red hair hides under a cap- much easier to hide in a crowd. She follows the other girls out toward the waiting crowd of audience members spilling out onto the streets. Some of them are parents with arms full of roses for their daughters, she’s sure.  
She holds a picture of a pair of smiling adults with arms full of flowers in her mind and slips down a back hallway, pretending not to hear the shocked cries behind her. The foolish people in the lobby don’t know that the grisly scene in seat G39 is for their own good. If political insurgents are allowed to live, these people won’t be able to go to ballets and pick flowers.  
Natalia slides out a side door, where a handler waits with a large gray van. A slight, red-haired man- her partner in this operation, and that thought thrills her even though she knows he did most of the hard work- already waits in the back. She climbs in and sets aside the box with her ballet slippers in it.  
She settles in a corner, but it’s barely been ten minutes when the van jerks to a halt and the back starts to fill with smoke.  
The red-haired man curses and shoves the back of the van open. Natalia tumbles out after him, coughing and trying to keep her hat from falling off  
She carefully positions herself slightly behind the red-haired man as the handler comes out of the cab, waving his hat to clear the smoke. His eyes are like chunks of coal set afire as he starts shouting and trying to see through the smoke in the back.  
There’s a park down the street, crawling with children. Natalia watches a little girl, barely bigger than the very newest girls at the facility, the ones who haven’t yet had the breakable ones weeded out. This little girls wears a brown coat with multicolored patches that flash as she tumbles down a slide- Natalia is certain that she is breakable, but that is why Natalia is here- so the breakable ones stay in one piece.  
Smoke tickles her nose, and she sneezes, coming back to herself in time to notice a handful of snowflakes tumble down. One falls on the handler’s nose, but he doesn’t seem to notice.  
“Can you fix it?” the red-haired man bites out. The handler turns around, and something in his smoldering-coal eyes is different.  
“Of course I can fix it! Look, it’s too suspicious for you and the girl to stand here, why don’t you take her to the park, blend in?”  
“What am I supposed to do with her there?” the man swings his arm and narrowly misses Natalia’s nose. “Do you know who I am? I don’t have time to play with little girls!”  
The handler narrows his eyes, “You want to stay under the radar, don’t you? I’m in charge, just take her over to the park and build a snowman or something, what do I care?”  
The red-haired man makes a huffing sound before turning and crouching down so their faces are only a few centimeters apart. “Listen. We’re going to go build a snowman. While we’re here you call me Papa, and I call you… Sasha. Understand?”  
Natalia raises her chin a little, “Yes, sir.” The man raises an eyebrow. She bites her cheek and quickly corrects herself, “I mean, yes, Papa.”  
He nods and rises, grabbing her hand, “And for both our sakes, act like a child.”  
Natalia takes that as a cue to put on her smile as they walk down the road toward the park.  
The stop at the edge of the park, and the man looks at her expectantly. She bites down harder of the inside of her cheek. Making a snowman was never part of her curriculum.  
The red-haired man rolls his eyes and bends down, forming a snowball, “See?” He rolls it around, accumulating more snow.  
She thinks she has the basic idea. Natalia forms a snowball of her own, carefully enlarging her own snowball.  
She tries to keep it perfectly round as the man keeps rolling his eyes.  
She’s patting the snow into a more regular shape when the snowball tumbles down a short hill, resting at the bottom with some chunks beaten out and new ones stuck on.  
She shrieks and chases after it, but the man says, “Leave it.”  
She looks up at him, braced for his response to the imperfections of her snowman, but instead he says, “Make another, Sasha. Smaller this time.” She obeys, with a little less regard for form this time.  
The lumpy ball rests next to the first one, and she looks up for further instruction. She still isn’t sure how this deserves the title of “man”, but she’s sure that there must be some reason.  
“Put it on top of the first one, then make a smaller one.” The man seems a little more relaxed and a little less likely to smack her over the head.  
It takes some doing, but she gets the second ball on top of the first, and is trying to get it to stay balanced while she grabs a fistful of snow and fills in the gaps when the weight lifts from her left hand. She looks up to see the man holding the snowball and glaring down at her, although it seems that maybe he’s doing it more for appearances, now. “Thank you, Papa,” she mumbles.  
The third ball goes quickly; she has the hang of it, now. They’ve just packed it on top of the second ball- she can sort of see it as a man, now- when the handler honks and the man turns on his heel. Natalia is about to follow when something blows across her face.  
She pulls it away: it’s a ragged piece of cloth, stained and colorless. Quickly, impulsively, she turns and ties it around the snowman’s neck before running toward the van.  
The back door clangs down, and she’s just about to climb in when something catches her eye; the snowman has a pair of sticks poking out of either side, making arms. Her eyes dart to the base, but there aren’t any tracks but hers and the man’s.  
She stares at the snowman until a rough hand pulls her into the van, and the handler clangs the door down.  
*  
5.  
Natalia flips the man onto his face and carefully tiptoes around the pool of vomit on the floor to grab the silky top that’s lying abandoned on the floor. The hotel room is eerily still in comparison to the raucous partiers still audible in the hallway, chanting and singing.  
She pulls the shirt over her head and scoops up the wine glasses, one empty and one barely touched before slipping onto the balcony and into the cool night air.  
The mark this time was a spy, suspected of feeding information to the Americans. He also had a taste for girls who were just a little too young: her hair had been braided into pigtails and her clothing carefully chosen to make her sixteen look a little more like fourteen. It’s good he’s dead, she affirms, tucking the glasses into her purse.  
She shimmies down the wall and slips out a side gate, blending in with a crowd of late night commuters until she can take a side road to the rendezvous point.  
The streets are full of dingy, gray slush and colorless muck. She tries to avoid them as much as possible, fearful of the consequences of staining her shoes; it’s been a while since the last snow, she guesses.  
She passes a park, and suddenly she’s sure that there ought to be a little girl there. She shakes the feeling off; why would a little girl be out at this hour? Still, she can’t help but scan the small structure for a figure in a patchwork coat. Somehow, she feels the absence like a hole in her chest. A fuzzy image of a snowball fight plays in her mind, the participants’ faces obscured, just out of focus; is it a memory?  
Something wet falls on her cheek, and she brushes it away. The drop glistens on her fingertip, and she berates herself- a black widow should not cry! How can she perform her duties and be so soft at the same time?  
Angry at her own weakness, she stalks toward the address that was drilled into her mind. Something else wet falls, on her forehead this time; she looks up.  
Snow is falling in big, fat flakes, settling on everything in a rapidly accumulating layer of white. She sticks her tongue out and catches a flake; she doesn’t know why. It tastes like metal and smog, but she smiles as she continues toward the rendezvous.  
*  
+1.  
The call comes out of a tiny town in Pennsylvania, called Burgess. There have been half a dozen reports of glittering black and gold creatures roaming in the middle of the night, and half the kids in town have bizarre but oddly consistent stories about being visited by mythical characters. Personally, Natasha thinks it’s overkill to call in the Avengers for something like this, and evidently Stark shares her opinion; he begs out on the grounds that he’s “not about to do Fury’s busywork”; it seems to be low-threat, so Banner stays with him, Thor’s on Asgard overseeing Loki’s trial, and Steve’s in the middle of moving to DC, so it’s her and Clint, just like old times.  
They arrive in Burgess just after school’s let out, in time to see the yellow bus that takes the children of Burgess to the elementary school two towns over burst forth its hyperactive cargo. Most of the kids head down the street toward home, but Natasha notices that half a dozen of them swing by a single house, adding a towheaded toddler to their ranks before rushing off into the sparse woods that surround the town.  
Burgess is unseasonably cold for the start of spring, and Clint pulls his coat tighter, quirking his mouth to the side in half a grin; this is just the sort of place he grew up in, “Where to first? The cops or the parents?”  
Bless their relatively little-known faces. Natasha considers; the police were initially reluctant to give SHIELD the files on the sightings, but the most the parents could yield is information on their children, and she’s already read all the school records; she’s just about say the police when a shout from the edge of the woods grabs her attention.  
“Hey Jack! Come play with us!”  
Her perusal of the files they were given didn’t list any children named Jack- or Jacob, or anything else that could lend Jack as a nickname- living in Burgess. She turns toward the sound to see a red-haired girl packing a snowball and throwing it in a direction that doesn’t seem to lend any targets, much less targets named Jack.  
“The woods,” she decides, leading the way before Clint can ask any questions. The girl is vanishing back into the trees, shrieking, when they arrive.  
“Hey, kid!” Clint calls. The girl turns, raising a suspicious eyebrow.  
“Yeah?”  
Seeing the expression, Natasha decides to take the lead, putting on her best “cool big sister” face, “We’re investigating reports of gold creatures running around the other night. You know anything about that?”  
“No.” It’s a decent attempt, but Natasha can tell it’s a lie.  
She twists her mouth to the side, “Wrong answer. Come on, we just want to know if you saw anything, what’s your name?”  
The girl crinkles her nose, “I’m gonna get my mom!”  
Clint chooses now to step forward, “Woah, woah, let’s not do that! Look, my partner and I are from SHIELD, we want to know what’s going on, if we need to get involved, ok? No one’s in trouble or anything, we just want information.” She can practically hear him complaining about how bad she is with kids, when they get back on the quinjet.  
The girl still looks a little suspicious, so Clint yanks out his badge and waves it around. The tension in her face relaxes a little, and she says, “I’m Pippa.” Then she stops, tilting her head like she’s listening to something only she can hear. “I think you should come talk to my friends.”  
Clint nods agreeably, and trots after her, deeper into the woods. Natasha follows at a more sedate pace, examining the trees for anomalies.  
Pippa’s friends are gathered around a frozen-over lake, sliding around on the ice and hurling snowballs. A handful of sleds are stacked to the side. “Hey, guys!” Pippa yells, and the flurry of activity halts.  
A little boy in a puffer vest steps forward, the toddler tagging at his heels, “Who’er they?”  
Pippa shrugs, “SWORD or HELMET or something.”  
Clint pulls his badge out again, “SHIELD, actually. We were wondering if you guys know anything about the creatures that were around a few nights ago.”  
The little boy puffs out his chest a little, “I’m Jamie and we don’t know anything.” His eyes dart to the side, and his head tilts.  
Clint purses his lips, but something about Jamie’s gesture sticks out; Natasha raises an eyebrow and asks, “Then what are you listening to?”  
The kids’ reactions seal any doubt. They jump, and then shift awkwardly from foot to foot. “N-no one,” one boy stutters.  
If she didn’t work for SHIELD, if she wasn’t an Avenger, maybe Natasha would believe him, but instead she sweeps the area with her gaze. Whatever- whoever- it is, maybe it’s only visible to children. If Thor hadn’t dropped out of the sky, she’d never believe it, but as it is, she’s sure there’s someone there. She can practically feel Clint’s questions for her building up as he tries to coax more information out of the kids, when all of a sudden he appears.  
If she weren’t trained so well, she’d have gasped at the unexpected sight of a wiry teenage boy with white hair perched atop a long stick, gazing worriedly at the kids.  
“Clint!” she says, then, “I see you.”  
The boy jumps and almost falls to the ground, but an unseen force grabs him, holding him a foot above the snow. The halting inquiry behind her grinds to a halt as the boy stutters, “You- you can?”  
She nods, “Who are you?”  
He stumbles to his feet, and his response sounds like a question, “Jack Frost? The- the Guardian of Fun.”  
Now she’s in her element, and she carries on brusquely, “The creatures?”  
He hunches his shoulders, “Well, you see, there was this guy Pitch….”  
The story spools out, Natasha providing description to Clint, who can’t for the life of him see the boy. The kids add their commentary as well, and by the end there’s almost half a foot of additional snow built up around the nervous spirit’s feet.  
As the tale winds to a close, Natasha nods, “I’ll put you in my personal files- I assume you don’t want to be in our main database?” Most agents don’t offer, but Natasha knows the feeling of not wanting to be quantified and reduced to a set of relevant, inhuman points.  
The kid shakes his head vigorously, losing the cool he seemed to have regained over the course of their conversation. Natasha smirks, “I think we’re done?”  
“Yeah,” he doesn’t seem ready to finish yet, though, because he floats alongside them as they head back to the van they rode into town.  
Natasha snorts, “Ask your question Frost.”  
He jumps, and Clint rolls his eyes at her bluntness. “Sorry. It’s just- are you Russian?”  
She furrows her eyebrows and nods.  
He grins, swooping upward, “I knew it! Do you remember the frost? And the snowball fight? And the snowman?”  
A snowman with a ratty scarf drifts into her mind’s eye, a memory she had been sure was planted, and she nods cautiously. “The snowman.”  
The spirit grins. “That was me!”  
Unsure how to answer, they remain in silence until they’re at the van and Clint is swinging his bow into the drivers’ seat ahead of him.  
About to climb into the passengers’ side, Natasha turns, looking back at the retreating spirit, and lets the wind carry him a soft, “Thanks.”

**Author's Note:**

> I just really like the idea of Clint being unwilling to accept anything as *actual* magic, etc.  
> "It's a trick, I know it."  
> "Clint, we're literally in space."  
> "A TRicK!"


End file.
